Thursday, 25 April 2013

Scots and Gaelic: words and their meanings: steamships, 'steaming', drunkenness and 'smuid' in Gaelic

SMOKING, DRINKING, DANCING AND SINGING ON THE HIGH SEAS:
STEAMSHIPS AND THE USES OF SMÙID IN SCOTTISH GAELIC

Donald E. Meek

Speakers of Scottish Gaelic are well used to the compound
noun bàta-smùide (‘boat of steam, steamship’) and its noun-phrase
variants, such as bàta na smùid(e), which are employed fairly regularly
in day-to-day Gaelic.The term,
especially in its second form, is particularly common in song and verse.The Skye poetess, Màiri Mhòr nan Oran
(Mary MacPherson) (c. 1821-98), is one among many Gaelic songsters who
travelled on steamships, and who saw the physical outline of their native
island through the smoke generously supplied by the furnaces of David
MacBrayne’s coal-burning vessels in the second half of the nineteenth century.Her verse contains several references to bàta
na smùid(e), as in the following quatrain (Meek 1998: 205):

’S iomadh rosg a nì mùthadh

Tighinn air bàta na smùide,

’S iad a’ sealltainn len dùrachd

Air bruthaichean Beinn Lì.

(‘Many an eye will change [to moistness],

when coming on the ship of steam,

and observing with hearty goodwill

the slopes of Ben Lee.’)

When teaching Gaelic at first level in a Scottish university
back in the 1970s, the writer had the pleasure of taking a class on Màiri
Mhòr’s verse, and conducting students through her spirited song in praise of
Ben Lee, the hill at the centre of the dispute which precipitated the Battle of
the Braes (1882).Each student was asked
to translate one verse, and when the verse cited above was reached, the translator
greatly – and unforgettably – entertained both the teacher and his classmates
by rendering Màiri’s bàta na smùide as ‘the ship of drunkenness’.Clearly, the student, true to form, was no
stranger to an alternative meaning of smùid in Scottish Gaelic, namely
‘intoxication’, commonly used in the phrase a’ gabhail smùid (‘becoming
[happily] intoxicated [on a specific occasion]’).

West Highland steamships

The daring translator of Màiri’s verse was conceivably aware
of more than semantics when he offered this revealing insight into the meaning
of smùid.Unknown to him,
however, he left his teacher with an interesting and enduring puzzle, to be
tackled in this article, about the etymological relationship between the two
types of smùid.The student was
obviously well familiar with maritime revelry on board late twentieth-century
mail-boats which served the Hebrides.He
may have been less familiar with the earlier role of the Hebridean steamship as
a floating bar, and indeed as licensed premises in a sea-girt part of Scotland
which, while well surrounded by liquid of one kind, could be so deprived of
ready access to another that the inhabitants had to resort to domestic stills
or to the regular arrivals of bàta na smùide in the days before licences
were granted to hotel-owners.Under such
constricting circumstances, voyages to and from the islands were heaven-sent
opportunities to slake thirst with liquor that was to be tasted and savoured
and enjoyed at every level – including the horizontal – before the ship reached
port.In her song ,‘Oran do
Dhail-na-Cluaidh’, on the Hutcheson/MacBrayne steamship Clydesdale
(built in 1862), Màiri Mhòr nan Oran seems to have commemorated her transfer in
1889 from the Glasgow-Skye-Stornoway run to Oban.She commented not only on the smoke from the
funnel, but also on the other kind of smùid, which offered a solution to
a variety of inhibitions.With an
audible chuckle, she employed the idiom a’ gabhail smùid (ibid.: 33):

Nuair a ghabhadh cuid an smùid

Dhen stuth a bh’ agad anns a’
chùil,

Cha tigeadh fàilinn air do ghlùin,

Ged bheirte sùrd air danns’ ort.

(‘When some would contract a tipsy haze

from the stuff you had in the cubby,

your knee would not fail in any way

though you would be put in a mood for dancing.’)

Dancing and singing, by passengers well lubricated by choice
blends, helped to cut time on long voyages.Lubricants were, in fact, such effective palliatives that passengers
often arrived at their destinations with remarkable speed, having lost days on
the way, and they were sometimes unconscious of – and, of course, on – their
arrival.As John MacLean, a Tiree bard
from Balephuil and latterly (1878) resident in Manitoba, expressed it in his
humorous song on his neighbour, Calum MacArthur, who evidently sailed to
Glasgow on Martin Orme’s Dunara Castle, the first steamship to provide a
regular service to Tiree from 1875 (Cameron 1932: 231-33):

Nuair thàinig an oidhche, cha robh suim do
na dh’fhàg sinn;

Chuir an dram às ar cuimhn’ iad is sinn cruinn anns a’ chàbin.

Cò nach òladh na fhuair e, ’s daoin’-uaisle ga phàigheadh?

Nuair a dh’iarradh a-suas sinn, bha is’ an Cluaidh aig a
h-àite

Gar cur a-mach.

(‘When night came, we did not give a hoot for those we
had left behind;

the dram erased them from our memory when we were
gathered in the cabin.

Who would not drink what he had received, when gentlemen
were paying it?

When we were summoned on deck, she was in the Clyde at
her place,

disembarking us.’)

Later MacArthur allegedly sought refuge from the Glasgow
hordes through the good offices of his friends, who took him to a heavenly
‘snug’ on board another ship:

(‘They took me to the cabin of the Clansman, and my very
double sat beside me;

it would well suffice people after they had left this
world

as a good place.’)

It was not necessary, of course, to go as far as Glasgow to
savour such delights.The steamship brought
them to Tiree.John T. Reid, who
travelled to the island on the new McCallum steamship, St Clair, in
1876, observed at Scarinish Harbour (Cooper 2002: 161)

‘…the Temperance Hotel – the only hotel in the island, and
but seldom patronized; so those who want spirits find in the steamboat a house
“licensed to retail spirits, porter and all”, and drouthy customers have thus a
special interest in the steamboat sailings.’

When Ada Goodrich Freer visited Tiree in 1894, the ‘drouthy
customers’ were much in evidence as soon as the MacBrayne vessel, Fingal,
arrived at the same harbour.Noting that
two ferry-boats which were already ‘apparently quite full of people were
boarding our little vessel’, she wrote (ibid.: 217-18):

‘Later we learnt that there were other reasons besides the
desire to meet friends, to get the mails, to fetch the cargo, why some of the
islanders greet MacBrayne with such eagerness….’

Going ashore from the Fingal, she shared a ferry-boat
with ‘the men who had so mysteriously come on board and who now came out of the
deck-cabin wiping their mouths and smelling of whisky.’

The patterns of the late nineteenth century were not exactly
novel.From their earliest appearance in
West Highland waters, steamships were associated with thick smoke and happy
inebriation. In addition to both kinds of smùid, they offered inspiring
subjects for poetic ardour. Ailean Dall MacDougall, bard to MacDonell of
Glengarry, was so fired up by the spirit of the new-fangled ships, their
captains and their crews, that he immortalised them in a eulogistic series of
songs. He paid tribute to the saloons of the Ben Nevis on her arrival in
Lochaber waters in 1824:

Seòmraichean geala gu h-ìosalFar an òlar fìon na Spàinte(‘White-coloured saloons are below,where one can drink the wine of Spain’)and he also described her smoke:’S àrd sna speuraibh chìthear smùid dhith,’G èirigh suas bhon fhùirneis ghàbhaidh(‘Smoke from her will be seen high in the skies,rising from the awesome furnace’).Interestingly, Ailean Dall refrained from
mentioning the smùid which might have
affected passengers overcome by the potency of the Ben Nevis’s wines, although it is evident that he welcomed
refreshing developments of this kind.

Serious English travellers, intent on
finding the spirit of Ossian, rather than any other sort, took a less
accommodating view of floating bars. They resented the unromantic mayhem which
they sometimes discovered on their first encounter with this unsteady, and
unsteadying, generation of steam-driven vessels.Thus, when travelling on the west coast in
1825, J. E. Bowman (1986: 125) was scandalised by the goings-on on the
self-same Ben Nevis, which he wished to
board at Oban for the journey to Fort William:

‘It was nearly four o’ clock when the Ben Nevis steamer
appeared within the Sound of Kerrera, and when she stood under the pier at
Oban, her deck was such a scene of tumult and disorder that we were at a loss
to assign a cause.She was altogether so
unsteady, that her wheels were lifted alternately out of the water. We,
however, got on board, and with some difficulty made our way to the stern;
where we learned she had a double complement of passengers (280 were on board)
in consequence of the Comet being under repair at Glasgow.The captain was also extremely drunk; the
heat and crowd both on deck and below, were intense, and some of the passengers
were somuch alarmed at their critical
situation, that they got ashore and remained at Oban.They gave such an account of their voyage
from Lochgilphead, that we determined, though reluctantly, not to go, and with
some difficulty got again ashore.’

Clearly the good ship’s facilities were somewhat
over-subscribed, and Bowman was not amused, despite the technical
circumstances.Vessels in dock for
repair, causing ‘double tasking’ of ships still operational, and imposing
unwanted strain on a company with little spare capacity, is apparently no new
thing, nor is maritime over-indulgence.Close on two centuries after Bowman, these worthy and time-honoured
traditions of short tonnage and ready supplies of liquor continue unabated with
the modern car-ferries of Caledonian MacBrayne, to the delight of contemporary
newspapers.A very recent report in the Oban
Times (9 December 2004) bears wry testimony to the sweet allure of the
liquors available on the present-day Lord of the Isles:

Ferry pair refused to budge

THE WARM welcome of ferry
operator Caledonian MacBrayne is well known, so much so that on Tuesday two
passengers did not want to leave when Lord of the Isles berthed in Oban
at the end of the Coll run.

The man and woman, described as
‘the worse for drink’, would not budge.

After 20 minutes the lady left,
with the help of the crew, but the gentleman was staying put and so the police
had to be called.

As a result Lord of the Isles
sailed 35 minutes late; her delay meant that the single linkspan in Oban was
blocked and Clansman was unable to berth and she, too, sailed 25 minutes
late.

Oban Police confirmed that a man
and woman were apprehended and a report would go to the procurator fiscal; the
pair enjoyed the hospitality of Oban Police Station until sober enough to
leave.

Excursion steamers on the Clyde

Despite the generosity of David MacBrayne and his
successors, it should not be thought that Gaels had a monopoly of, or a special
propensity for, over-indulgence on steamships.In this respect they shared much with Scots- and English-speaking
Lowlanders, especially in Glasgow, where trips ‘doon the watter’ were opportunities
to partake of strong liquor supplied in considerable abundance by the
ship-owners.From their beginning as
‘society boats’ patronised by the well-to-do in the first half of the
nineteenth century, the ‘fast boats’ (bàtaichean luatha) of the Clyde
had broadened their appeal by the 1870s, partly by offering the prospect of
some gentle lubrication. As a result, a sail on the river was greatly favoured
by the ‘working class’, and the excursion steamers became little more than
floating public-houses.Ian McCrorie
(1986: 24; cf. Paterson 2001: 197-202) notes that:

‘With the cheap fares on offer for a sail “doon the watter”
in the [eighteen] seventies, the all-the-way steamers were ideal vehicles of
drunken excesses.By now the Sunday
steamers were purveyors of spirits also, and the worst excesses were to be
found on the Sabbath where the veteran ill-kept craft which ended up in the
trade were merely havens for chronic drunks.This behaviour tended to put others off travelling all the way from
Glasgow and in fact encouraged the defection of more and more of the public to
the railways.’

Sensing that matters had gone too far, a group of
businessmen formed a company which built and maintained a ‘teetotal’ steamship,
the Ivanhoe, launched in 1879, and skippered by Captain James
Williamson. ‘His discipline was strict,’ says McCrorie, ‘and he kept a clean
and immaculate ship’. No rowdyism was tolerated on board, and the steamer often
carried a band which played on the promenade deck.The strongest drink on board was water, and
those who wished a dram purchased what was called an ‘Ivanhoe flask’
before embarking.

The Ivanhoe’s good example notwithstanding, most
Clyde steamers continued to provide bars.A stealthy visit to this strategic part of the vessel was often
euphemistically disguised by the phrase, ‘going to see the engines’, since the
mechanical miracle of the steam engine, with the engineer on his platform
responding to the bridgetelegraph,
pulling the levers and opening and closing valves, was a spectacle well worth
viewing – and no doubt well worth celebrating with a quick nip.Both traditions are maintained to the present
on the paddle-steamer Waverley.

The role of alcohol in attracting passengers was
acknowledged on the east coast of Scotland as well as on the west, on the Firth
of Forth as well as the Firth of Clyde.The concept of the ‘booze cruise’ emerged as British cruise-liners
cashed in onAmerican Prohibition in the
1920s and early 1930s.Its basic
principles had reached Scotland by at least 1934-36, when the Redcliffe Shipping
Company operated services on the Forth with such vessels as the ex-MacBrayne
paddler Fusilier and the Highland Queen.Their excursions, writes Brian Patton (1996:
111),

‘seemed to be planned to attract those who found the
Scottish licensing laws somewhat restrictive; this applied particularly to the
late Saturday cruise which left at 10 pm!Apart from Kirkcaldy, the Redcliffe ships did not call anywhere and
often did not go anywhere in particular, but perhaps patrons did not mind about
that.It is recorded that on one
occasion Highland Queen was berthed by the master and a boy, the rest of
the crew being quite incapable of action by the time she returned to base.’

Ireland, England and Wales

Despite its strong attestation in Scotland, it would be wrong
to conclude that maritime over-indulgence is a purely Scottish phenomenon.One of the earliest accounts of the influence
of alcohol on steamship passengers derives from a letter by the Rev. Dr John
Kirk, a Scottish Congregational minister, who travelled to Campbeltown on the
Glasgow-Belfast steamer in the autumn of 1837 – a voyage which he did not
anticipate with any joy (Kirk 1888: 109-10):

‘Passing down the Clyde, my gloomy apprehensions were
increased by a strong head-wind.But
after leaving Greenock the night was dark.I went down to the cabin, and found a strong smell of whisky, which
caused me to take the deck as soon as I got my hat exchanged for a travelling
cap.This abominable effluvium caused me
to dread its presence, so that I kept upon deck for a considerable time.But the intense cold compelled me to venture
down again.I got stretched upon a sofa,
and, in spite of the smell and din of drink, fell asleep….

‘You have seen an Irish steamer about the end of
harvest?In one part were a number of
what appeared to be tradesmen drinking and singing at a most stentorian
rate.In a small place round the funnel
were squeezed several others, who sang loudly.I know not how they could breathe in such a place….Behind them lay
stretched a brawny Highlander and his dog.I went forward and took a look at the steerage.It was crowded with people talking and
singing in complete confusion.They
seemed to be chasing both peace and comfort from the place.’

Excursion steamers elsewhere Britain were, and still are,
just as liable as ‘service ships’ to experience their share of on-board
inebriation.The Bristol-based company,
P. & A. Campbell, which owned a small fleet of white-funnelled steamers
until the 1960s, was no stranger to excesses of this kind, particularly on its
services between South Wales and Weston, and the North Devon ports.Welsh day-trippers were particularly prone to
such practices on board ship, especially on Sundays, when public houses in Wales
were closed.A strong police presence
was frequently required at those ports where passengers disembarked. As one of
Campbell’s former masters, Captain George Gunn, recalls (1997: 61):

‘Rowdy passages were not uncommon. The master of a ship was
legally the licensee of the bars, and when problems looked likely we kept them
closed.The miners from the valleys, who
frequently came in large numbers, took to this kind of thing in good spirit and
resorted to singing.’

The tradition is maintained to the present by the motor
vessel Balmoral, now consort to the Waverley.When the Balmoral visited Ilfracombe
(North Devon) in August 2004, her inebriated and boisterous Welsh passengers
had to be restrained by police, whose numbers had been increased in
anticipation of trouble for local shopkeepers(Cruising Monthly 41: 290-91).

In the English Channel, similar adventures were associated
with the ships of the General Steam Navigation Company, to the extent that the
French government made representations to the Foreign Office about the
behaviour of passengers from the Royal Daffodil, who, having savoured
the vessel’s liquors while in transit across the channel, were inclined to
descend rudely upon the genteel drinking-spots of northern France.When the sailings of the Royal Daffodil from
London to Boulogne and Calais ceased in 1965, that in itself became a cause of
restrained celebration by harassed diplomats in the British Embassy in Paris
(Robins 2003: 52).

Terminology

It is of considerable interest to our investigation of
bibulous descriptors that, in Glasgow parlance and also more widely in
Scotland, a person who has over-indulged in strong drink, and who displays the
symptoms, is often said to be ‘steamin’’ (with the qualifier ‘wi drink’
sometimes added for good measure).This
idiom offers a direct parallel to Gaelic phrases employing smùid, a word
whose basic meaning appears to be ‘haze, smoke, steam’.The similarity in terminology suggests, prima
facie, that Gaelic may have borrowed the idiom from Scots, or vice versa,
or that both Scots and Gaelic are drawing on vocabulary associated with key
referents in particular contexts, and extending it in ‘associative’ terms – the
key referents in this case being steamships, associated with easy access to
strong drink and thus drunkenness.It is,
of course, also feasible that the two languages developed their similar idioms
independently, or, more probably, interactively.To consider the possibilities, we must turn
first to available dictionaries or lexicographical archives which set out the usages
of Sc.G. smùid and Scots steam/stim on historical principles.

Scottish Gaelic evidence for the uses of smùid

The Archive of the Historical Dictionary of Scottish Gaelic
(HDSG-A), housed in the University of Glasgow, provides a useful, but
incomplete, body of material in the form of paper slips.It is very evident that the citations for the
word smùid reflectserious gaps
in the coverage of relevant texts.For
example, there is no record in HDSG-A of Màiri Mhòr’s or Ailean Dall’s usages
of the word (cited above).As we shall
see, these are important to the argument of this paper.It is no less apparent that such citations as
there are are often too short to provide a reliable context for the deduction
of meaning.What we have in HDSG-A is a
very helpful index rather than the basis of an historical dictionary.In the following analysis, the reliable and
useful parts of the evidence of HDSG-A are given, supplemented when necessary
by material (*) drawn from the writer’s knowledge of Gaelic literary sources.

(…and out behind them all, on the fringe of the kingdom,
the Long Island like a thousand skerries, rising on the surface of the ocean, a
haze of joyful celebration rising from each one of them, when the sun was
passing over their summits, leaving them a thousand miles behind her)

’S àrd sna speuraibh chìthear smùid dhith,’G èirigh suas bhon fhùirneis
ghàbhaidh*MacDougall
1829: 194(Smoke from her [sc. the steamshipBen
Nevis] will be seen high in the skies,rising from the awesome furnace)

(…and then the water [sc. from a hot Icelandic
spring] will rise up in one spout, one hundred and twenty feet, as straight
as an arrow in the skies, and when the water stops rising, the white spray will
then begin, like a thousand steamships on a calm evening, letting off steam.)

(…a large old wifie came in, and she had a good bucket of
drink on her, and she was taking staggers from side to side)

Bha smùid airMurdo MacLeod, Uig
(Lewis), MS 1967: 32

He was happily drunk

This carries the note: ‘Fo
bhuaidh an uisge-bheatha.An cumantas ’s
ann toilichte bhios duine nuair a chanas sinn gu bheil smùid air’ (‘Under the influence of whisky.Generally a man is “merry” when we say that
there is a smùid on him.)

(Out we went to meet the ship of steam, the Maid of
Morven, as they call her.She was
approaching us from Mull, going as hard as she could [lit. putting the hazes/steams off her (with hissing and puffing?)].)

The above citations show
that smùid is used in a variety of
maritime contexts, most conspicuously in the sense of ‘smoke’, but shading
predominantly towards ‘steam’, in a compound with bàta, soitheach and pacaid
from 1824 (2.3).

Smùid is used regularly in
a range of meanings and idioms in the prose writings of Dr Norman MacLeod
(‘Caraid nan Gàidheal’).MacLeod had a
particular concern to introduce rural Gaels to the novelties and challenges of
the industrialising Lowlands of Scotland.In 1829 MacLeod wrote the first Gaelic prose account of a steamship, Maid
of Morven, on a voyage from Morvern to Glasgow
(Meek, forthcoming a, b).Because of its
relatively detailed description of the ship, her machinery, passengers, and
performance, this is a very important historical piece, and all the more
valuable for having been written in Gaelic.MacLeod seems to have had a special interest in steam power, which was
certainly one of the novelties of the early nineteenth century.His essays show that he employed three Gaelic
words in the sense of ‘steam’, namely deathach (mainly steam for the propulsion of static machinery, such as cotton
mills – ‘na muillean mòra sin a tha ’falbh le cumhachd na deathaich’ [‘those
large mills that are driven by the power of steam’] (Clerk 1867: 83)), smùid (steam which drives mobile vehicles, such as trains
and ships) and toit (‘smoke’, used much
less frequently, and noticeably less comfortably).In a citation in 2.3 above (‘…an sin éiridh
an t-uisge suas…’), he uses all three words to represent ‘steam’, largely for
stylistic variety.

Beyond MacLeod’s writings,
deathach was seldom used of ships,
although occasional examples can be found:

(There were no
steamships or railways in existence; so we set out across the Middle Moor on
foot.)

Toit was employed somewhat
more frequently in compounds with bàta.Bàta-toite is found first in print in 1829, having been chosen by Allan
MacDougall (Ailean Dall), or his editor, as the favoured term for ‘steamship’
in the titles of songs, e.g Oran don bhàta-thoite den goirear
Ceann-cinnidh (‘Song on the steamship which is
called Chieftain’).Ailean Dall himself employs it of the Stirling
[Castle], the paddle-steamer which was
responsible for the drowning of his chief, MacDonell of Glengarry, in
1828.His phrase – am bàta dubh
toite (‘the black boat of smoke’) –exudes darkness, danger and death in that
context (MacDougall 1829: 204):

Do ghnùis àlainn ga
dochann

Leis a’ bhàta dhubh
thoite,

Dan robh dàn a’
mhì-fhortain,

’S am fear a dhealbh air
an stoc i,

B’fheàrr nach beirt’ e bho
thoiseach le mhàthair.

(Your beautiful face being disfigured

by the black boat of smoke,

which was destined for misfortune,

and the man who designed her on the stocks,

it were better had he never been given birth by his
mother.)

A more neutral use of the
term is found in Duncan Black Blair’s poem Eas Niagara (‘Niagara Falls’), composed about 1848 (Meek
2003:90-1):

An uair shealladh tu fada
air astar

Air an ioghnadh,

Is e theireadh tu gur
bàta-toite

A bh’ ann le smùidrich.

(When you would look from a distance

at the wonder,

you would say it was a steamship

with all its smoking.)

Dr Norman MacLeod clearly
had a liking for smùid as a flexible,
humorous and multi-faceted word, since it occurs frequently in his writings,
but as far as can be traced, he does not use smùid of ‘inebriation, intoxication’. It is
noteworthy that the first recorded example of smùid in this sense (printed in 1891, but probably to be
dated to 1889) is indeed that cited at the outset from Màiri Mhòr’s verse, and
– significantly – it also concerns a ship (see 3 above).If we are not misled by lack of earlier
citational evidence in HDSG, this usage emerges only in the second half – or
more specifically the last quarter – of the nineteenth century.It seems to be conspicuous by it is absence
in the first flush of the steamship era (before c. 1850), when steamship
services to the islands were still relatively restricted, and not yet generally
accessible to the working classes.Services expanded rapidly after 1850, and especially after 1870, with
the building of larger ships, like Martin Orme’s Dunara Castle of 1875 (Robins and Meek, forthcoming).

Smùid in this sense also
appears to be largely unattested in ScG dictionaries compiled before 1900.Only in dictionaries of the later twentieth
century is this meaning given a prominent place, as gabhail smùid becomes an ‘acceptable’ (or at least a humorously
mentionable) pastime. It is significant that Dwelly’s magisterial
turn-of-the-century dictionary does not give this sense for the word, although
it appears fairly regularly in modern (post-1950) ScG dictionaries (e.g.
Watson). Initially, therefore, smùid as
‘intoxication’ may well have been a ScG colloquialism which made its way into
‘respectable’ use, and particularly into print, at a comparatively late
stage.

Apart from its basic
meaning as ‘haze, mist’, and broader contexts involving the sea and ships,
there is no obvious ScG starting-point for the extension of smùid to ‘intoxication’.It is, in fact, difficult to relate the sense of ‘haze’ or ‘smoke’ to
‘intoxication’ without postulating an underlying figure of speech, such as
‘alcoholic vapour exhaled, like haze or steam, by a person in a state of
inebriation’.This could have
been the meaning behind the application of smùid to ‘inebriation, drunkenness’, and it may have
predated our present range of citations, but we have no evidence (to date) to
support this earlier meaning.

Development via a figure
of speech is certainly possible.In
Standard English and Scottish English, ‘slang’ descriptors of drunken states
(‘sloshed’, ‘smashed’, ‘stoned’, ‘tanked’ and such like) constitute ‘picture
language’ of an indecorous kind, and smùid
would fit that category.As the
‘Historical Thesaurus of English’, currently being compiled at the University
of Glasgow, amply demonstrates, various states and stages of inebriation have
produced an almost inexhaustible profusion of figurative, and often naughtily
humorous, descriptive phrases across the centuries.Some of these derive from ships and the sea,
among them ‘whole seas’, ‘top heavy’, half-seas over’, ‘half-channelled over’,
and ‘three sheets in the wind’.

The case for figurative
extension of smùid would be reinforced
if we could invoke the existence of an intermediate, specific context which may
have determined the ‘new’ meaning, like ‘becoming drunk in close
proximity to a steam-powered means of providing drink’. If there were no earlier precedent, some such catalytic and
pictorial context, which ‘fixed’ the ‘new’ meaning, may have facilitated the
understanding of smùid as ‘intoxication’
(and not merely as a ‘daze’), particularly when employed directly in the idiom bha
smùid air, which appears to have co-existed
alongside an identical idiom with a different meaning (see the last citation in
5.3).

We may note further that
the idiomatic use of smùid + aig + air
as ‘doing something energetically’ (5.2) frequently refers to, and implies,
song and music, and thus merriment, which could be associated with ‘intoxication’
of various kinds.There is, however, no
evidence in the citations to support a direct connection, or the development of
the sense of ‘intoxication’ from this context, but it is clear that a pliable
and sympathetic range of idioms with smùid
existed, and that the sense of ‘intoxication’, once created, could be fitted
neatly within it.

It is important that we
now consider possible starting-points and stimuli in contexts other than, or in
addition too, ScG for the use of smùid
in the sense of ‘intoxication’.

Irish: the diverging
frontier

We may turn first of all
to the evidence for the use of smúit in
Irish.The most significant discovery in
this context is that the same word in Scottish Gaelic and Irish, while sharing
basic meanings in both the major Goedelic dialects, is applied quite
differently within the ranges of idioms which employ it.As the Dictionary of the Irish
Language demonstrates, the principal meaning of
the word in the early medieval period is ‘vapour, smoke’(DIL
cols 291-2).In Modern Irish, the
semantic and idiomatic ranges are given by Dinneen (1069) as:

In compounds with other
nouns, smúid- conveys the sense of
‘befogged, dull, obscured’ (ibid.).

These ranges are confirmed
by Ó Dónaill (1120).To underline the
difference between Scottish Gaelic and Irish usages, we need cite only one
idiom given by Ó Dónaill:

Chuir sé smúit orainn uile,
he depressed us all.

In Scottish Gaelic the
same idiom would mean the exact opposite, namely ‘It/He caused us all to become
(happily) intoxicated.’

The fundamental difference
between Scottish Gaelic and Irish usages would thereforeappear to be that, whereas in Scottish Gaelic
the predominant understanding of smùid
is ‘vapour or haze which rises from
something’ (thus generally embracing positive activity), in Irish the word
seems to mean mainly (though not exclusively) ‘vapour or haze which settles
on something’ (thus generally embracing negative
activity).Scottish Gaelic and Irish
appear to coincide only in the phrase bàta smùide (found, significantly, in Antrim Irish, with its links with Scottish
Gaelic) and in idioms relating to the raising of dust from activity, such as
working energetically or travelling on the road (as in Scottish Gaelic, dh’fhalbh
e le smùid sìos an rathad, ‘he went down the
road at full pelt (lit. with dust, haze [rising]’).Ó Dónaill also gives one further idiom which
corresponds (in sense, though not in prepositions) to Scottish Gaelic usage
(2.7):

Bhain sé smúit as a chuid airgid, he spent his money freely.

Clearly, Scottish Gaelic
and Irish (and especially their speakers) do share some general characteristics
(and social habits), though not precise idioms.In this case there is nothing that would suggest a fundamental parallel
in the use of smúit in the sense of‘intoxication’.This meaning is attested only in Scottish
Gaelic.

English and Scots: the
interactive frontiers

Although there is no
significant correspondence between Scottish Gaelic and Irish in this use of smùid
/-t, Scottish Gaelic and Scots appear to share
similar ‘idioms of intoxication’ relating to smùid/steam.Given the
absence of comparable idioms in Irish, this raises the question of whether Scots
has borrowed from Gaelic or vice versa.We also need to consider possible influences
from English, as certain usages of steam
(noun and verb) given in OED have
meanings relating to intoxication.

OED defines the basic
meaning of steam as ‘A vapour or fume
given out by a substance when heated or burned’ (1.1 a) or specifically ‘An
odourous exhalation or fume’ (1.1 b).It further defines it as ‘A noxious vapour generated in the digestive
system; the “fume” supposed to ascend to the brain as a result of drinking
alcoholic liquor’, as in a citation from Marston 1602, Antonio’s Rev. V. iii, ‘Pieros lips reake steame of wine’ (2
b).Although OED provides no examples later than 1605, and classifies
this usage as Obs[olete], it will be
evident immediately that we do have in 2b a definition of steam which is remarkably close to that posited
tentatively above for ScG smùid, by way
of explaining its transition to ‘drunkenness’, namely ‘alcoholic vapour
exhaled, like haze or steam, by a person in a state of inebriation’.

We must note, however,
that, whatever the semantic parallels between ScG smùid and English steam, they are two completely different words, from very different
roots.OED gives Old Teutonic *staumo-z,
‘of obscure origin’, as a starting-point for steam.Gaelic smùid, on the other hand, appears to be the cognate of
English smut and German schmutz, with a possible root *smuddi (MacBain 331), although both of the latter imply
‘dirty spots’ rather than ‘vapour or steam’.

OED also demonstrates that
the English verb steam, generally when
accompanied bythe preposition up, can sometimes be used in slang to mean ‘drunk,
intoxicated’, and it gives two citations, dated 1929 and 1950 respectively (2
b).However, in one of these citations
this preposition does not appear.This
occurs in J. Terrell, Bunkhouse Papers
xii. 156, and is a very recent attestation, dating to 1971: ‘A cowman sat next
to the houseman, and he was steamed with liquor so that he slumped a little to
one side.’

Similarly, for modern
Scots, SND (s.v. steam) offers only one example of steamin’, in the phrase steamin’ wi’ drink. The evidence, which (frustratingly for an
historical dictionary) lacks a corroborative citation, is taken from D. Rorie, Mining
Folk, of 1912.SND notes that the phrase is
known in this sense in Fife and Orkney, and more generally in northern and
mid-Scotland.No less interestingly for
our purposes, SND defines stim, n., as ‘A haze, a mist, e.g. on the sea, on a cold surface like glass, etc. (Ork.
1929 Marw.)…stim(m)is, n., fig. of a state of uncertainty or doubt, a daze,
stupefaction’, with a citation from an Orkney source c. 1880.SND
suggests that stim may be a borrowing
from steam.If this is so, it supplies a possible further
dimension to the sense of steam, as
(conceivably) ‘daze, stupefaction [from excessive consumption of
alcohol]’.However, it must be noted
that SND’s citations show this to be a
word known predominantly, if not solely, in Orkney and Shetland.

If we set aside OED’s citation from the seventeenth century of
‘obsolete’ usages of steam as ‘alcoholic
fume’, the literary evidence would seem to indicate that Scottish Gaelic has
the earliest and most consistently attested body of usages in which a word
signifying ‘vapour, steam’ as its principal meaning is also used of
‘inebriation’, beginning c. 1889.This
would lead naturally to the prima facie
conclusion that Scots and English, with chronologically later citations, may
have borrowed the idiom from Scottish Gaelic, as may have happened with words
such as sgaoil (Meek 2005).

At this point, however, we
need to exercise the greatest possible caution, and pay close attention to the
nature of the evidence presented by our written sources.What dictionaries like OED and SND do not
record to any significant degree is the oral interaction between two (or more) languages in a country such as
Scotland with its long-standing linguistic diversity.It is quite possible that, in an oral and
bilingual context, exchanges of various kinds may have begun at a date much
earlier than the first attested lexicographical example of a phrase used in a
particular sense.It may even be
possible that the formative exchanges moved in the opposite direction to that
implied by the surviving literary evidence,
based solely on citations from texts.Thus, despite the earlier literary attestion
of ScG usages of smùid as ‘inebriation’,
the Scots phrase steamin’ wi’ drink, or
some such figurative use of steam, may
have precipitated the semantic extension of the ScG word so as to embrace the
effects of alcohol.The absence of this
sense for Irish smúit suggests strongly
that it was not a root meaning for the word, and that Scottish Gaelic may have
adjusted the semantic range of smùid in
response to external, non-Gaelic precedent.

In fact, when the writer
was growing up in the island of Tiree in the 1950s and 1960s, he was very well
aware of (and often chuckled at) humorous and colloquial ScG idioms which used
the Scots (or English) word steam – the
consequence of a bilingual interface – in precisely the same position and with
exactly the same meaning as ScG smùid,
‘intoxication, inebriation’.These
bilingual idioms were regularly of the following kinds:

Chaidh e don Lean-to, agus thog e / ghabh e steam uamhasach.

(He went to the Lean-to
[sc. a popular Tiree public house, which was ‘appended’ to Scarinish Hotel,
formerly the Temperance Hotel!], and he raised / took a tremendous steam [sc. intoxication].)

Bha steam mhòr air a-raoir.

(He was steaming greatly [with
drink] last night.)

Ghabh e steam gel a-raoir.

(He took a steam[ing]
gale [sc. a particularly bad bout of
intoxication] last night.)

In all but the last of
these examples, where the Scots origin of the phrase is doubly apparent, ScG smùid could be substituted directly for Scots steam.An
interactive Scottish Gaelic and Scots oral dimension to smùid / steam is
therefore more than evident, even in the later twentieth century.At such a bilingual interface semantic
exchanges could occur easily, effortlessly and with a minimum of literary
attestation, perhaps reinforcing or bringing to prominence commonly shared
idioms which lived furtively and darkly on the periphery of ‘good conversation’
(in both senses).

This leads to a further,
essential caveat when handling the evidence of existing literary sources for
the uses of smùid and steam.The ‘slang’
and ‘indecorous’ nature of the many popular, idiomatic descriptors of
humanity’s abject ‘inebriated condition’ has been noted.It is likely that such ‘vulgarities’ (which,
even now, are likely to be somewhat repulsive to well-mannered folk) were
excluded from ‘polite company’, and not allowed to emerge in publishable
literary records and narratives, including dictionaries, until standards of
literary acceptablity began to change after the close of the Victorian
era.

Full steam ahead?Concluding overview

In Scottish Gaelic, it
would seem likely that it was only with the growing prominence of the
vernacular language in a literary context that smùid meaning ‘intoxication’ began to show its face, as in
the late nineteenth-century verse of Mary MacPherson, Màiri Mhòr nan Oran,
whose immensely rich command of Skye Gaelic gives a large part of their power
to her more spirited songs, and provides (hitherto) our first recorded examples
of smùid as ‘inebriation’.At the same time, social class and social
habits (including the consumption of alcohol and its public availability) were
undergoing a gradual transformation. Steamships, and eventually steam trains,
threw Gaels and Lowlanders into closer association with one another, sometimes
quite literally as they responded with an unsteady, on-board dram to the waves
and shocks, the challenges and vicissitudes, of the mechanical wonders of the
industrial era.As ancient practices
were challenged or re-routed by modern technology, old words could discover new
meanings, or gain new pulses of semantic life in unexpected ways.

The arrival of the
steamship in Highland and Hebridean waters from at least 1819 must have been a
potent factor in linguistic, as well as technical and social, interaction and
stimulation (Meek, forthcoming a; Robins and Meek, forthcoming).The rising pressure exerted by steam, as a
means of conveyance and cultural exchange, particularly after 1870, probably
had implications for the lexis of Scottish Gaelic, as much as it had for that
of English, in which a range of idioms based on ‘steam’ developed
prominently.In Scottish Gaelic, smùid, rather than deat(h)ach (which lives largely in the dictionaries), became
the regular word for ‘steam’ in a maritime context.Like steam, it is a neat monosyllable with an initial, onomatopoeic s-.Consequently
it was press-ganged happily into service as the perfect, one-word equivalent
ScG descriptor for the noisy haze that feathered from the tall, smoky funnels
of new-fangled, Clyde-built steamships. In this context it far outstripped the
use of toit (‘smoke’), which was much
less frequently used in the compound bàta-toite (‘ship of smoke’), as toit had
a darker hue, and, lacking the sense of ‘vapour’, could not be extended so
readily to ‘steam’.In addition, by the
nineteenth century smùid already
possessed a range of activity-related, idiomatic uses which were likely to make
it receptive to further creativity.Linked to external sources by new connecting-rods, it could engage in
triple-expansion of its semantic energy by interacting subtly with the
steam-driven idioms of Scots and Scottish English.

Even if conclusive
evidence emerges to demonstrate that smùid
had a connection with ‘alcoholic fume’ before 1850, it seems highly likely that
its common application in the sense of ‘drunkenness, intoxication’ – a usage
distinctive of Scottish Gaelic, and not found in Irish – was in large measure a
consequence of the steam-based industrial developments of the nineteenth
century, and that this meaning gained prominence after 1850.The body of evidence currently available
suggests that it was apparently not a matter of straightforward borrowing, or
the resuscitation of a ‘dormant’ meaning of smùid which was biding its time until the Industrial Revolution brought it
to the fore.Rather, it was in all
probability part of a more complex process of Sprachkontakt, involving ‘idiomatic exchange’ and ‘semantic nudging’
between Scottish Gaelic, Scots and/or Scottish English, and the speakers of
these languages.This process is likely
to have begun in the context of ‘taking a steam’ (i.e. going for a sail on a
steamship: cf. OED 9) and becoming ‘the
worse for wear’ or ‘steaming’ as a consequence of what was all too readily
available on board a steamship.Scots
and Scots English may have been the vehicles of semantic reinstatement of an
earlier, submerged meaning of steam,
which was subsequently grafted on to ScG smùid, as smùid became the regular
ScG word for ‘steam’ from ships and trains.

‘The ship of drunkenness’,
which so entertained class and teacher back in the 1970s, may thus have been
more than a ghost-ship emerging from post-prandial haze in a misty student mind.To a skilful poet like Mary MacPherson, who
had a well-honed awareness of verbal nuances of various kinds in her native
language, together with a warm appreciation of human nature, the humour of
homophones, as well as their ambiguous consequences, was doubtless very
evident.She may not have paused to
think about semantic relationships, but the correspondence is probably more
than coincidental or merely phonological.Bàta na smùide was indeed capable
of carrying a well-stocked cùil (‘corner
cupboard’) – and it was one which could produce as much of a smùid as her boiler and engine, when the passengers
themselves began to emulate the good ship and let off steam.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am most grateful to the Department of Celtic, University
of Glasgow, for allowing me access to, and use of, relevant word-slips held in
HDSG-A, on which I laboured during the 1970s.As is usual in a lexicographical voyage of this kind, I have been
expertly piloted through the shoals by Ms Lorna Pike, Co-ordinator of Faclair
na Gàidhlig, in matters pertaining to Scots and English dictionary sources and
to general method.However, I alone am
responsible for the marshalling of the Gaelic evidence and for the conclusions
reached on the basis of that evidence.

Dr Nick Robins, author of several important books on the
development of British shipping, read the first draft and supplied helpful
information on maritime indulgence south of the Border.The Rev. Dr William McNaughton kindly drew
my attention to the maritime adventure of the Rev. Dr John Kirk.

I am deeply indebted to Professor Christian J. Kay and
Professor Rob Ó Maolalaigh, both of the University of Glasgow, for reading the
first draft of this article.Professor
Kay provided very useful citations from the ‘Historical Thesaurus of English’,
and Professor Ó Maolalaigh furnished valuable references to further Gaelic
material.

Donald, I added our conversation from a social networking site to my blog with its URL here, - http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2013/07/eubalaena-glacialis-conversing-about.html - crediting the photo+ above to you. In looking at your blog (e.g. http://meekwrite.blogspot.com/2013/04/maritime-and-linguistic-studies.html), I wonder if the use of blogspot 'labels' (e.g. 'shipping,' 'ships,' 'Scots,' or 'Gaelic,' or some such) would help thematize, etc., but especially make your blog more easily accessible. See the labels I use as an example above. Your 'shipaldry' (a heraldry neologism :) is fantastic, Donald.

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